In 1972, Roman Cybriwsky made a call from a pay phone in University Park, PA where he was finishing his PhD at Penn State in geography, and was so convincing that he was instantly offered a job teaching urban geography courses at Temple. Now, 44 years later, he still has that job, meaning that (1) he had found his niche early on, and (2) that he knew how to carve a niche. Over the years, he taught as well at the University of Victoria and the University of British Columbia in Canada, was a Senior Researcher on a 3-year urban research project at the University of Pennsylvania, and was privileged to be a Visiting Scholar at the Center of Advanced Studies at the National University of Singapore. In 1984 he became one of the first Temple faculty to teach at the Temple University Japan campus in Tokyo. He has since returned there again and to teach and conduct research, and has spent about 10 years total in Tokyo. For a contrasting experience at a Japanese institution, he taught geography courses for a semester at Hitotsubashi University. For almost six years until the end of 2006 he was Associate Dean at TUJ. His years in Japan resulted in several books. After returning to main campus, Roman Cybriwsky turned his attentions to Ukraine and its capital city, Kyiv. In 2010-2011 he was Fulbright Scholar at the prestigious and historic National University of Kyiv Mohyla Academy, where he taught urban sociology and conducted research that produced a 2014 book about Kyiv.

His first appointment was in the Department of Geography at Temple, and then in Urban Studies, where he became Director and was one of the central characters in effecting the merger that created the Department of Geography and Urban Studies. For six years in the 1990s, he was Department Chair. In between returning from TUJ and going for research to Kyiv, he was Director of Asian Studies at Temple. His teaching and research focuses on contemporary cities around the world. In the early part of his career, he wrote primarily about Philadelphia, especially the early years of gentrification and accompanying social tensions, and then in turn about Vancouver, Singapore, Batam (an urbanizing, global-economy Indonesian island within sight of Singapore), Tokyo, and Kyiv. The Tokyo and Kyiv experiences have been especially productive in terms of books. He continues with research in Ukraine. His most recent book will be published soon: it is a comprehensive study of the Dnipro, the important river that flows through the heart of the country. When he was younger, Roman Cybriwsky ran one marathon after the other and used to sneak home early whenever he could to train. Now that he is older and cuts a much larger presence, he stays out late at night to walk in circles around 8- and 9-foot tables to shoot a pretty good game of pool.

Selected Publications

UKRAINE’S RIVER: A SOCIAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY OF THE DNIEPER/DNIPRO, completed, to be published soon.

GLOBAL HAPPINESS: A GUIDE TO THE MOST CONTENTED (AND DISCONTENTED) PLACES AROUND THE GLOBE. Santa Barbara: Greenwood Press, 2016.

KYIV, UKRAINE: THE CITY OF DOMES AND DEMONS FROM THE COLLAPSE OF SOCIALISM TO THE MASS UPRISING OF 2013-2014. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2014.

CAPITAL CITIES AROUND THE WORLD: AN ENCYCLOPEDIA OF GEOGRAPHY, HISTORY, AND CULTURE. (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO/Greenwood, 2013).

ROPPONGI CROSSING: THE DEMISE OF A TOKYO NIGHTCLUB DISTRICT AND THE RESHAPING OF A GLOBAL CITY (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011).

‘Changing Patterns of Urban Public Space: Observations and Assessments from the Tokyo and New York Metropolitan Areas,’ CITIES: THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF URBAN POLICY AND PLANNING, 16, 4, 1999, pp. 223-31.